The transition from research to entrepreneurship in control and automation requires technical excellence, and also entrepreneurial mindset, strategic thinking, and understanding of commercialization. This tutorial aims to enhance entrepreneurial thinking by presenting authentic testimonials and career path stories from multiple perspectives within the control community. The session will feature several recently established entrepreneurs who have successfully launched startups based on control research, sharing their journeys from academic insights to commercial ventures. Complementing these perspectives, we will see how to integrate entrepreneurial thinking into research programs, and navigate the boundary between academic excellence and commercial relevance. Finally, the session will provide insights into what industry seeks in research-based innovations and how young researchers can position themselves for impact.
Through these diverse narratives, attendees will gain practical understanding of different pathways from research to entrepreneurship, strategies for identifying commercial opportunities in control research, and approaches to building networks that bridge academia, industry, and entrepreneurship. Interactive discussion segments will allow participants to engage directly with speakers, explore specific challenges, and develop their own entrepreneurial perspectives.
This tutorial is designed primarily for early-career researchers in control and automation who are exploring career options and seeking to develop entrepreneurial thinking — regardless of whether they pursue startup ventures, industrial careers, or academic paths with entrepreneurial elements.
| Talk 1 | Alisa Rupenyan — How to pitch your idea: beyond the science (good practices to acquire funding for your startup) |
| Talk 2 | Laurens Jakobs — When control loops leave the lab: reflections from two years into a control engineering service provider |
| Talk 3 | Alejandro Astudillo — From paper to product: lessons learned scaling physical intelligence from TRL 1 to TRL 9 |
| Talk 4 | Sehoon Oh — The control engineering challenge for humanoid profitability: lessons from industrial robotics |
| Talk 5 | Takenori Atsumi — Connecting control theory to practice: implementable robust control and a benchmark problem for HDD head-positioning servo control |
| Talk 6 | Efe Balta — Robotic 3D printing toolkit: from research toward a product |
| 20 min | Breakout groups — attendees split into groups to discuss commercialization ideas based on their own research and prepare a short pitch using a dedicated tool, presented in 3 minutes per group. |
| 20 min | Q&A — collecting relevant questions and gauging interest for mentorship in the community, feeding directly into the work of the IFAC Industry Committee’s Task Force on Entrepreneurship and Startups. |
Alisa Rupenyan is a Professor of Industrial AI at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. She spent several years at universities in the Netherlands and Switzerland for her doctoral and postdoctoral research in ultrafast laser physics and spectroscopy, was later lead scientist at a robotics start-up developing ML-based sorting and sensing technology, and between 2018–2023 was a group leader in automation at inspire AG and senior scientist/PI at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich. Her research sits at the intersection of machine learning, control, and optimization for industrial applications and robotics. She is an innovation expert for Innosuisse and the European Commission, and chairs the IFAC Industry Committee’s Task Force on Entrepreneurship and Startups.
Laurens Jakobs is a control engineer and co-founder at Nikwist, a Leuven-based engineering service provider specialized in motion control systems and mechatronics. He obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from KU Leuven in 2021 and subsequently worked as an industrial postdoctoral fellow in high-tech industry. In 2024 he co-founded Nikwist, where he teams up with R&D and engineering teams from SMEs and multinationals across various industries as a consultant.
Alejandro Astudillo leads Product Research and Innovation at T-ROBOTICS (now TRENER), a startup bringing physical intelligence to industrial robotics. Originally from Colombia, he obtained his PhD from KU Leuven in early 2023, where he stayed as a postdoctoral researcher working on efficient algorithms and software tools for motion planning and control in robotics. In early 2024 he joined the founding team of T-ROBOTICS as Chief Product Officer during the pre-seed and seed stages, leading the effort to translate academic research into deployed robotic solutions.
Sehoon Oh is a Full Professor in the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering at DGIST, South Korea. He specializes in robotics, control theory, and mechatronics, and serves as a committee member for IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. He earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo.
Takenori Atsumi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, at the Chiba Institute of Technology (CIT), Japan. Before joining CIT in 2015, he spent over 15 years in industry at Hitachi, Ltd. and HGST Japan, developing control technologies for storage systems.
Efe C. Balta received his B.S. in manufacturing engineering from Istanbul Technical University (2016) and his M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2018, 2021). He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Automatic Control Laboratory (IfA), ETH Zurich, from 2021–2023. Since September 2023 he has led the Control and Automation Research Group at inspire AG and remains a guest senior scientist at IfA. His research interests include control theory, optimization, statistical learning, robotics, cyber-physical systems, and additive manufacturing.
The tutorial is relevant to students, faculty, and professionals interested in commercializing their research. Students may be interested in learning about the risks and challenges of entrepreneurship, strategies to mitigate them, and ways to attract funding for a startup idea. Faculty — particularly those with some entrepreneurial experience who can also serve as mentors — can offer their perspective and benefit from the discussion. Industry researchers can share their perspectives on control solutions and control-based technology as a product. The session is also an opportunity for networking across these different groups.
This tutorial is organized by the Task Force on “Startups and Entrepreneurship” of IFAC’s Industry Committee, chaired by Alisa Rupenyan, and supported by NCCR Automation (Switzerland’s National Centre of Competence in Research for Control and Automation).
The organizers have run related sessions before: